Groov-e Thunder Review

Design

• Black, plastic chassis
• Portable with an integrated handle
• Convenient controls

As expected for a speaker that’s this cheap, the Thunder doesn’t necessarily ooze quality with its fit and finish. The chassis is predominantly black plastic, and for a speaker of its size, it’s surprisingly light, giving me some questions about its long-term viability as a party speaker.

Nonetheless, against other bigger speakers, it’s portable due to its lighter weight and the presence of a large red handle on the back of the unit. For taking to a gathering, simply pick it up and away you go.

The controls on the Thunder are big and bold on the top side of the speaker for power, volume, play/pause, seeking tracks and for basic control of its RGB lighting. The buttons themselves are rubberised and have a surprising amount of tactility to them.

As much as this speaker doesn’t tout any real form of water or dust resistance as a feature on its spec sheet, it’s a pleasant surprise to see a rubberised port cover here. Underneath, you’ll find a USB-C port for charging the speaker and a USB-A port for playing music from a locally stored drive with a capacity of up to 64 GB.

Features

• Presumably basic codec support
• Convenient Bluetooth pairing
• Flashy RGB lighting if you want it

Admittedly, the spec sheet for the Thunder is quite scant. There isn’t mention of things such as waterproofing or codec support. I can safely assume the codec support is limited to SBC and AAC, with none that are more advanced, such as LDAC. You’ll have to spend more for that, obviously.

As for Bluetooth, this speaker connects via Bluetooth 5.3, with pairing handled by holding the power button down until you hear a tone, and the Thunder shows up in your device’s Bluetooth settings. It worked fine with either my Honor Magic V3 or a FiiO JM21 DAP, with both connecting without a hitch.

In the vein of being a party speaker, there is a ring of RGB lighting around the main driver inside for added flashiness. Thanks to a dedicated button on this speaker’s control panel, you can cycle between different patterns and colours, ranging from solid red/green/blue to an entire rainbow if you want it.

Battery life here is reasonable for such a cheap speaker, with Groov-e claiming up to ten hours of runtime between charges at moderate volumes. With its USB-C input for charging, I also found it to be quite brisk to get back to full charge, although this speaker can’t itself act as a power bank, as other Bluetooth ones out there can.

Sound Quality

• Bass-first sound can colour the entire frequency response
• Audio is fine, if lacking in depth and width
• Can get loud, but you may face sound distortion

In a general sense, party speakers come with a bass-first sound designed to provide a bit of rumble and power to cut through the noise of a social gathering and provide a bit of atmosphere. This is common through the range of sizes these types of speakers are available in, from larger, wheeled choices right the way down to smaller and cheaper ones, such as the aforementioned JLab Go Party.

The Thunder is no different in this regard, putting the bass first and foremost, which becomes noticeable in tracks such as Let’s Groove from Earth, Wind and Fire, with its deep, synth bass that takes up a lot of room against even the vocals and horns.

The problem is that this default, bass-centric tuning bleeds into other types of music where it isn’t necessarily warranted. Paul McCartney’s Coming Up, for instance, has a simplistic bassline running through the whole song that became more noticeable on the Thunder than with other cheap speakers, and it pushes other elements, such as his vocal, the funky guitar riff and horn section rather far back into the mix.

The likes of the Tribit PocketGo, as more affordable speakers go, are much cleaner in the way they portray music. There’s more depth from that tiny 7W unit than from this much bigger one, with the audio out of the Thunder feeling one-dimensional.

Brand X’s Dance of the Illegal Aliens is quite a frantic and busy track with its competing elements of bass, percussion, guitar and keyboards. While it was possible to pick out these pieces individually, there wasn’t much width to the Thunder’s presentation.

Spinning up lighter tracks, such as Jack Johnson’s Tape Deck, reveals an okay presentation of mid-range elements, such as his vocal and the bright acoustic guitar across the song’s duration, but it lacked a certain depth and energy that I’d expect from a speaker of this kind. Likewise, the sound didn’t go beyond the confines of the unit, leading to a weaker soundstage.

20W of amplification means the Thunder can also get plenty loud enough to be usable in those party-style scenarios, although it isn’t necessarily without some distortion towards the top of the volume limit, which is a bit of a shame.

Should you buy it?